The New York Times’ new public editor’s last column praised the paper’s reporters and photographers for climbing stairs in the dark to find and interview and photograph victims of Hurricane Sandy:

That’s just one example among many in which Times reporters went to extraordinary lengths to get the stories of ordinary people’s suffering. I was equally struck by Cara Buckley’s and Michael Wilson’s’s front-page article about life without power in New York’s public housing projects.

It included this passage: “As light drained from the skies above the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn on Thursday, Sharlyn Marin, 18, huffed her way up 140 steps to visit her godmother, Judith Rodriguez, on the 10th floor. Blind and in a wheelchair, Ms. Rodriguez, 62, relied on Ms. Marin as her sole conduit to the outside world.”

Such articles, involving shoe-leather reporting at its best, are not easy to get. The only way to get those scenes is to be there — in this case, to climb the stairs in a dark and dangerous housing project.

Ms. Buckley told me about her experience in an e-mail: “It’s actually a 14-story building, and the photographer, Ruth Fremson, and I went to the top twice and then worked our way down. No matter the time of day, the stairways were pitch black, windowless and without power.”

That’s their job.

These days, the expression “shoe leather” journalism seems unfamiliar to many reporters, especially those who came into the field assuming that Google has the answer to everything. Instead it means leaving the cozy, familiar newsroom and building and neighborhood. It means walking/climbing/hiking — doing whatever is necessary on foot (and by plane/car/bus/donkey/boat) — to get on-scene to witness and report the gritty details of a story.

It demands guts, street smarts, preparation — knowing what to wear and what to carry, finding and hiring fixers and drivers and interpreters.

Great reporters tells us what the air smells like, what the baby was eating, the color of the walls and the size of the windows. They capture tone, light, anecdote, vernacular, nuance. They bring us into that place and make us feel what those in that place are feeling, whether joy or terror. They smell the blood, sometimes even slipping in it.

They do not phone it in. They do not Google it or look at a Google map to see what the devastation looks like or watch it on TV or read it out of someone else’s story.

Great reporting on tough stories like this one mean getting, literally, down and dirty, joining the story where and when it’s happening. It means that reporters and photographers will indeed also end up hungry, thirsty, tired, sore and worn out — like the people whose lives they’re there to describe to readers many miles away, safe and warm and dry.

Great journalism is fueled by compassion. Not every story requires it, obviously, but when reporting on war, poverty, violence, crime, natural disaster or medical mishap, a reporter unwilling to live it firsthand is only going to report a dessicated, sanitized version of the facts.

My husband and I have both done this sort of reporting work, I as a writer and he as a photographer. In winter, he spent six weeks covering the end of the Bosnian war. He had to sleep in an unheated metal cargo container and his Christmas meal was a small packet of dried soup. He and the reporter and their interpreter, their car car stuck, were towed out of a snowbank at dusk because Jose had thought to pack a carabiner in his luggage.

I’ve seen car windows sheeted with blood after a head-on collision, and — nauseated and terrified — walked toward the vehicle to see what make and model it was. I’ve walked across frozen fields, climbed muddy embankments, knelt on dirty floors. I flew to Winnipeg, Edmonton and Toronto on a medical investigative story, and watched the women I interviewed shake and cry as they related their misery to me. It was exhausting and emotionally draining for all of us.

This time it is Marie Colvin, a woman in her 50s — both highly unusual features for a war correspondent — who has died while covering the uprising in Syria. She was killed with a French photographer, Remi Ochlik, when the house they were in, in Homs, was shelled.

Colvin lost an eye in 2001 while covering the war in Sri Lanka when she was hit by shrapnel. She saw the man who threw it at her.

Wearing a black eye patch, she went right back to work, doing a job that still — reasonably — terrifies most people.

War reporting has changed greatly in just the last few years. Now we go to war with a satellite phone, laptop, video camera and a flak jacket. I point my satellite phone to South Southwest in Afghanistan, press a button and I have filed.

In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially the same – someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen.

We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.

Marie, an American, belonged to an international fraternity whose membership is open only to those somehow willing and able to withstand the insanity and horrors they must witness firsthand in order to tell the rest of us about it.

I lost my eye in an ambush in the Sri Lankan civil war. I had gone to the northern Tamil area from which journalists were banned and found an unreported humanitarian disaster. As I was smuggled back across the internal border, a soldier launched a grenade at me and the shrapnel sliced into my face and chest. He knew what he was doing.

Just last week, I had a coffee in Afghanistan with a photographer friend, Joao Silva. We talked about the terror one feels and must contain when patrolling on an embed with the armed forces through fields and villages in Afghanistan … putting one foot in front of the other, steeling yourself each step for the blast. The expectation of that blast is the stuff of nightmares. Two days after our meeting Joao stepped on a mine and lost both legs at the knee.

I learned abut Marie’s death a few minutes ago when my husband — a career news photographer and editor who has photographed in a war zone himself — came into the bedroom to tell me.

As I logged into Facebook, I read the tribute to her by Borzou Daragahi, another American working in the region for a British paper, the Financial Times, testifying to her generosity and friendship.

I assigned stories to Borzou in 1988, when he was just beginning his career.

When a journalist like Marie is killed, or Joao injured, their tribe — worldwide — mourns. It could have been us, or our husband or wife or son or niece. We know these people and we live in daily fear for their lives, even as we rely utterly on them to do their terrifying and dangerous jobs.

I’m the broad behind Broadside, Caitlin Kelly, a career journalist. photo: Jose R. Lopez You’re one of 14,910 followers, from Thailand to Toronto, Berlin to Melbourne. A National Magazine Award winner, I’m a former reporter and feature writer at The Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette and New York Daily ... Continue reading →